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DocPad vs Jekyll: What are the differences?
Developers describe DocPad as "Designers and developers can create websites faster than ever before". Empower your website frontends with layouts, meta-data, pre-processors (markdown, jade, coffeescript, etc.), partials, skeletons, file watching, querying, and an amazing plugin system. DocPad will streamline your web development process allowing you to craft full-featured websites quicker than ever before. On the other hand, Jekyll is detailed as "Blog-aware, static site generator in Ruby". Think of Jekyll as a file-based CMS, without all the complexity. Jekyll takes your content, renders Markdown and Liquid templates, and spits out a complete, static website ready to be served by Apache, Nginx or another web server. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host sites right from your GitHub repositories.
DocPad and Jekyll can be categorized as "Static Site Generators" tools.
Some of the features offered by DocPad are:
- Versioning
- Pre-Built Skeletons
- Language Agnostic
On the other hand, Jekyll provides the following key features:
- Simple - No more databases, comment moderation, or pesky updates to install—just your content.
- Static - Markdown (or Textile), Liquid, HTML & CSS go in. Static sites come out ready for deployment.
- Blog-aware - Permalinks, categories, pages, posts, and custom layouts are all first-class citizens here.
"Plugins. Easy to use" is the primary reason why developers consider DocPad over the competitors, whereas "Github pages integration" was stated as the key factor in picking Jekyll.
DocPad and Jekyll are both open source tools. It seems that Jekyll with 38.1K GitHub stars and 8.31K forks on GitHub has more adoption than DocPad with 2.99K GitHub stars and 250 GitHub forks.
As a Frontend Developer I wanted something simple to generate static websites with technology I am familiar with. GatsbyJS was in the stack I am familiar with, does not need any other languages / package managers and allows quick content deployment in pure HTML
or Markdown
(what you prefer for a project). It also does not require you to understand a theming engine if you need a custom design.
Pros of DocPad
- Npm4
- Open Source3
- Database-free3
- Plugins. Easy to use3
- Customizable2
- Helpful community2
- Free2
- Flexible2
- Cross-platform2
- GitHub Pages plugin1
Pros of Jekyll
- Github pages integration74
- Open source54
- It's slick, customisable and hackerish37
- Easy to deploy24
- Straightforward cms for the hacker mindset23
- Gitlab pages integration7
- Best for blogging5
- Low maintenance2
- Easy to integrate localization2
- Huge plugins ecosystem1
- Authoring freedom and simplicity1
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Cons of DocPad
Cons of Jekyll
- Build time increases exponentially as site grows4
- Lack of developments lately2
- Og doesn't work with postings dynamically1